ISSUE 15 // 12.4.2023

WHAT’S NEW?

Friebert’s Twilight

If you’ve yet to catch Joseph Friebert: The Experimental Years, you have just three short weeks to get in and see what you’ve been missing. It’s a fitting time to take in these paintings, too. Friebert had a fondness for the poetic complexity of endings, whether it was the last breath of light at the end of a day or the final works of an artist’s career. These finales were a wellspring of inspiration for Friebert’s art, things that he alchemized into beginning after beginning. As the year rounds out and the night takes the sky a little sooner each day, come find the perpetual twilight that drew so many to Friebert’s semi-abstractions. Who knows? Maybe this ending will spark something new for you, too.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Question Everything

In 1937, the artist, writer, curator, and collector John Graham (1886–1961)—best known for his eccentric tall tales and portraits of cross-eyed women—published System and Dialectics of Art, a book that had a major influence on the young vanguard artists of New York in the 1940s (think Jackson Pollock, Stewart Davis, David Smith). Written in the Socratic method, System and Dialectics poses a series of 129 questions ranging from the strikingly complex (“What is art?” “What is beauty?”) to the strangely specific (“What is the part of the horse in art?”) One by one, Graham proceeded to answer all of them in that contradictory, wide-ranging, insightful way only he could. 87 years later, Madron Gallery is answering them again.

Our spring 2024 show is a contemporary exhibition featuring the work of 14 Chicago and Midwestern artists at various points in their careers and lives. The connecting point is Graham’s text—each artist has been paired with one of his 129 questions. This time, though, we’re letting their art be the answer. System and Dialectics of Art opens March 4, 2024, at Madron Gallery. (Curious about the book? It’s been out of print for a while, though most art reference libraries carry a copy—you can also find the whole thing online here.)

WHAT’S THAT UP TOP?

Meat Cute

As a boy, Alexander Z. Kruse (1888–1972) lived with his family in a tiny tenement at 133 Henry Street (yes, that Henry Street) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, what many considered the capital of Jewish America. Like any neighborhood on that crowded island, whatever you needed was liable to be a stone’s throw away in the form of a mom-and-pop shop: the pharmacy, the tailor, the hardware store. Or the butcher. So many butchers. In 1902, there were about 1,500 kosher butcher shops in New York City; in 1930, over 7,500. In his Kosher Butcher Shop, Kruse shows us one. Absent is the chaos many described as par for the course—Fridays especially, when getting the butcher’s attention required yelling over both the hordes of people around you and the squawks of live chickens, but also the not-infrequent strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellions (perhaps most memorably, groups of Jewish women on the Lower East Side protested price hikes in kosher meat in 1902 by absconding with meat from the shops, dousing it in gasoline, setting it aflame, and throwing it into the street).

In Kruse’s scene, though, we are dropped into what seems to be the epitome of orderliness and calm; there’s a warm, inviting glow, people in fine clothes, no one in any particular hurry. Kruse had a penchant for portraying the dignity of labor and the everyman, perhaps in part influenced by his father. Sigmund Kruse, a cigar maker by trade, was also a socialist and an intellectual, bringing the ideas of Engels, Marx, and Kant to the cigar bench to discuss with his fellow workers, going on to help form both the cigar-makers union and the American Federation of Labor. Where some may have seen the mayhem and squalor of life on the Lower East Side, Alexander Kruse pulled out something else—something ineffable, like how people saw themselves, who they were under a different sort of condition, in the quiet moments where dreams and ideas could root. As for the sweet black cat? Perhaps a visitor in search of a treat from nearby McSorley’s Ale House, a favorite haunt of Kruse and John Sloan. Inquire about Kruse’s work here.